Qcdoc: Quantum Chromodynamics on a Chip (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Qcdoc: Quantum Chromodynamics on a Chip (2015)

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29 pointsrbanffy7 comments

That chip was nothing but a PowerPC Risc with some special functions. Nothing too exting.

If you really want to tackle Lattice QCD with ASICS you could go much further than this chip. Since Lattice QCD is nothing more than Monte Carlo integration over a specific Hamiltonian you could start with implementing a good deterministic random number generator in hardware. Then you can make some major optimizations calculating the Hamiltonian by cleverly seperating addition and multiplication and trasformation to a logarithmic number system, so that you only have additions in the end. All of this has already been implemented on a FPGA years ago.

What a strange article. I am not a physicist but I know pop-culture QED/QCD (Feynman) and this article strikes me as: A) A load of bullshit buzzwords B) Title gore, should be just "Simulating QCD on a custom computer" or simply "Simulating QCD" C) They're trying to get some government funding or worse - VC funding.

Please prove me wrong.

I wouldn't call it bullshit buzzwords, but "quantum chromodynamics on a chip" brings to mind some godawful cross of a quantum computer and a particle accelerator.

Otoh, the title appears to be a faithful to the computer's name.

Seems like it’s just computing history write-ups, looking through the EPCC post history.

It seems like they want to emphasize how they designed hardware to do that simulation.

Lattice QCD is something legitimate that people have been working on since the 80s. Some of the earliest massively parallel machines like the Connection Machine were thought to be useful for it. It’s totally plausible that physicists were crazy enough to build a custom Supercomputer for it. They routinely build complex custom ASICs for particle detectors. Note also the time (2004) nowadays they use GPUs for lattice QCD.

People (the same people, actually) were building (not-so-)custom supercomputers for QCD (and other tasks) in the 80s:

https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/1989/02/epn...

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